Ralf Brenner
Local Partner at GSK Stockmann (Munich)

Ralf Brenner is a Local Partner at GSK Stockmann in Munich with over 25 years of experience, including two decades in senior in-house roles and as managing director of a regulated investment company. He advises asset managers, banks, financial service providers, KVGs, insurers, institutional investors, and fund sponsors on the full spectrum of German financial regulation. His core focus includes the German Investment Code, the German Banking Act, the German Trading Act, compliance and investigations, and licensing. Ralf has led the establishment, re-licensing, and acquisition of asset management companies and managed related M&A processes. He regularly supports international managers entering or operating in Germany, with an emphasis on Master-KVG structures. His work includes acting as outsourced compliance officer, preparing and guiding clients through BaFin special audits and supervisory reviews, strengthening compliance and legal departments as a “workbench,” and coordinating with supervisory authorities on the appointment of managing directors and board members, authorization extensions, and compliance obligations. He joined GSK Stockmann in 2021.

Robert Kramer
Partner at GSK Stockmann (Munich)

Robert Kramer is a Munich-based partner at GSK Stockmann and a highly experienced adviser specialising in investment and financial regulatory law. He has particular expertise in the structuring, launch and restructuring of closed-end and open-end investment funds investing in non-liquid assets such as real estate, renewables, private equity and debt instruments. Besides focusing on fund products Robert also advises fund managers on their regulatory requirements. Other areas of focus include project and mezzanine financing, financial distribution and advising on complex regulatory issues. Robert’s clients include above all AIFM, non-licensed asset managers and financial distributors, who appreciate the highly proficient and trusting working relationship they have with him. In addition, he assists institutional investors with fund due diligence and advises on matters relating to renewable energy and real estate contracting. Robert is also the author of numerous articles on financing and funds law. Robert joined GSK Stockmann as a lawyer in 2001.

Germany’s Asset Management in 2026: Regulation as a Competitive Edge

Germany’s asset management industry enters 2026 with a mature regulatory framework and a pragmatic operating mindset— governance-first, evidence-driven, and technology-enabled— translating regulatory certainty into strategic advantage for firms that invested early in systems, people, and process. These dynamics remain anchored in the implementation of AIFMD II via the forthcoming Fondsrisikobegrenzungsgesetz (FRiG) and related KAGB amendments, the codification of liquidity tools, clarified loan-origination parameters, expanding reporting, and ongoing digitization under solid German legal scaffolding. Within this landscape, the German Standortfördergesetz (StoFöG) sits as a macro “location policy” reference point that practitioners should monitor for practical interfaces with fund structuring, market access, and innovation—recognizing that the attached source does not set out StoFöG’s operative text or sector-specific measures for asset management. The observations below integrate StoFöG where it plausibly touches the already-defined regulatory trajectory, while preserving the article’s evidence-based posture.

Sustainability: From Labels to Liability

Sustainability in practice has shifted from branding to audit-ready process across public and private markets, with legal exposure driven less by rule novelty than by failures to align day-to-day operations with stated objectives; this reality frames any location-policy incentive or programmatic measure under StoFöG as additive at most, not a substitute for rigorous evidentiary discipline in disclosures, data lineage, and remediation protocols. If StoFöG were to reference sustainability-linked development or modernization initiatives, the defensible posture remains conservative drafting anchored in verifiable documentation and transparent limitations where data cannot be obtained proportionately. Firms should therefore map any StoFöG-related initiative into existing product-governance controls to avoid misstatement risk.

AIFMD II and FRiG: Targeted Recalibration, Tangible Effects

AIFMD II is a refinement, not a rewrite, tightening delegation oversight, harmonizing loan-originating fund rules, and requiring a more structured approach to liquidity and reporting, with Germany’s transposition via the FRiG setting concrete application dates— April 16, 2026 for most obligations and April 16, 2027 for expanded reporting—leaving little room for transitional complacency. In this construct, StoFöG’s relevance is not to alter EU-derived prudential content but to the extent it intersects with the “location” conditions that support the operating environment for German AIFMs and UCITS ManCos, such as administrative efficiency, facilitation of innovative operating models, or investment-friendly frameworks that do not conflict with AIFMD/KAGB rules. As a practical matter, firms should treat StoFöG as a potential enabler of execution (e.g., streamlining ancillary approvals or supporting innovation infrastructure) and continue to calibrate core compliance to FRiG/ KAGB timelines and supervisory expectations.

Liquidity and Valuation: Specificity, Tools, and Testing

German law now requires managers of open-ended funds to pre-select at least two liquidity management tools, embed strategies and activation/deactivation procedures, and operationalize documentation and readiness by April 16, 2026, with BaFin and ESMA expectations favoring one coordinated implementation rather than staged rollouts. Any StoFöG-related initiative that touches market infrastructure or investor protection should be treated as a contextual factor only; it does not displace the fund-specific legal duties to calibrate LMTs, notify BaFin on activation/deactivation events, and ensure valuation governance—especially for hard-to-value or tokenized assets—is evidence-based, independently validated, and conflict-controlled. Where StoFöG promotes digital or capital-market infrastructure, managers should nonetheless preserve the model-governance and committee-record rigor that supervisory dialogue now presumes.

Loan-Originating Funds: Clarity with Guardrails

The clarified framework for loan-originating strategies in Germany—definitions, risk-governance requirements, leverage caps, concentration limits, prohibitions on related-party and consumer lending, risk-retention parameters, and cost transparency—remains the operative legal baseline for debt funds. StoFöG does not change those sectoral guardrails as set out under KAGB since Germany benefits from its already existing national framework in light of AIFMD II’s aim to harmonise the relevant EU-level rules.

At most, location-policy measures could influence adjacent aspects such as the attractiveness of Germany for private credit platforms or the development of servicing and data ecosystems. Managers should therefore continue to hardwire independent credit committees, escalation mechanics, borrower-monitoring standards, and reporting capabilities to meet investor and supervisory expectations, while scanning for StoFöG-aligned opportunities that do not compromise these controls.

Reporting Discipline: The Quiet Advantage

Harmonized and expanded AIFM and UCITS reporting—covering market and instrument data, risk and asset disclosures, leverage, outsourcing details, distribution jurisdictions, and unique identifiers—elevates data lineage, explainability, and reproducibility as determinants of credibility. If StoFöG fosters data or digital infrastructure relevant to reporting efficiency, firms should integrate such enablement within existing data-governance charters, vendor SLAs, and retention policies, maintaining the capacity to reconstruct reported figures under scrutiny. The operating truth remains that the ability to show sources, transformations, approvals, and controls can matter more than the absolute numbers when trust is at stake.

Outsourcing, Resilience, and White-Labeling

Supervisory expectations for outsourcing and resilience are internalized across audit rights, incident notification, data localization where applicable, crisis enforceability, and cyber-integrated continuity planning, with AIFMD II clarifying that managers may perform the same functions for third parties provided conflicts are managed. StoFöG’s potential to support location advantages—for example, by encouraging high-quality service ecosystems or digital capabilities—should be harnessed without diluting the heightened diligence of critical providers, the demonstration of competence and resources at authorization and on an ongoing basis, and the expanded transparency around outsourcing and distribution arrangements. The German market’s convergence of cyber and outsourcing oversight remains decisive for operating models such as white labeling.

Retail Distribution and Investor Protection

As the EU’s Retail Investment Strategy moves from proposal to implementation, we can expect a meaningful recalibration of Europe’s retail distribution landscape. The package is poised to tighten product governance and value-for-money expectations, sharpen conflicts-of-interest controls around distribution incentives, and push the market toward more transparent, comparable, and digital-first disclosures. For manufacturers, this will translate into more granular cost and performance scrutiny, pressure to evidence fair pricing versus peer benchmarks, and closer alignment of product design with clearly defined target markets. Distributors should anticipate stress-testing their advice and appropriateness frameworks, revisiting inducement models, and strengthening oversight of advertising and online engagement. Supervisory convergence across Member States will likely reduce scope for regulatory arbitrage while raising the floor on enforcement. In practical terms, firms that proactively map revenue dependencies, remediate high-cost or poor-value offerings, invest in disclosure usability, and modernize data and monitoring capabilities will be best placed to navigate phased rulemaking and preserve cross-border scale—turning compliance into a competitive differentiator rather than a drag on growth.

Retail-facing distribution continues to prioritize suitability, cost and risk transparency, and consistency across marketing and product documents, with AIFMD II elevating name–strategy alignment and expanding pre-contractual and periodic disclosures, including fee and cost transparency, SPV usage, and portfolio composition for credit funds. StoFöG, if it advances the overall attractiveness of Germany’s retail or semi-professional investment landscape, does not relax these obligations; legal teams must still reconcile asset complexity, liquidity constraints, valuation uncertainty, and fee waterfalls with the distributor’s protective frameworks and machine-readable data demands. Location-policy benefits should be expressed through better execution, not thinner documentation.

Tax, Structuring, and Authorization Nuances

Tax remains a competitive lever, with practice focusing on evidencing alignment between strategy and substance, arm’s-length transfer pricing, fee allocation across group entities, and robust documentation—especially when portfolio management is delegated. StoFöG may be relevant to the extent it encourages investment, innovation, or simplifications that influence vehicle selection or operational footprint in Germany; however, authorization for AIFMs and UCITS ManCos will still hinge on expanded application content under AIFMD II/KAGB, including senior management availability, EU-residency requirements, and detailed outsourcing information with due diligence and monitoring of delegates. Managers contemplating new licenses or scope extensions should treat StoFöG as a potential contextual tailwind while preparing comprehensive dossiers aligned to the FRiG/KAGB rule set.

Digitization: Tokenization and DLT Move to Operating Reality

Tokenization of instruments and fund units and DLT-enabled operations are moving into production in Germany under frameworks for electronic securities and crypto-asset treatment, with best-practice documents clarifying rights, governing law, custody, key management, and AML/KYC, and with cyber risk integrated as an evergreen governance concern. If StoFöG supports digital market infrastructure or innovation clusters, managers should leverage those benefits while maintaining legal clarity on settlement finality, netting, enforceability of smart contracts, and the mapping of each legal right to a technical control with manual override mechanisms— choices that enable

Cross-Border Operations: Passporting with Proof

German managers continue to use EU passporting and selected private placement regimes under increasingly evidence-driven processes, with diligent control of notifications, local-language disclosures where required, and strict handling of reverse solicitation. Distribution from third countries into the EU is evolving as eligibility screens move toward the EU’s high-risk third-country tax list and OECD-standard tax information exchange requirements. StoFöG’s relevance here would be indirect at most, potentially influencing Germany’s attractiveness as a distribution hub or service center; it does not change the necessity of robust sanctions, AML, and beneficial-ownership transparency across the investor lifecycle or the recalibrated onboarding and periodic refresh routines demanded by regulators and partners.

Governance, Culture, and Remuneration

Governance quality differentiates outcomes—independent boards, conflicts policies mapped to real scenarios, and compensation frameworks with deferral and malus/clawback actually applied— supported by speak-up cultures, refined lines of defense, and documentation discipline that renders decisions reconstructable under scrutiny. As AIFMD II and FRiG take effect alongside horizontal regimes, firms are aligning variable pay with ESG, IT, and cybersecurity objectives, embedding compliance KPIs into target agreements. StoFöG, as a policy to strengthen Germany as a business location, may complement these firm-level choices by encouraging investment in capabilities, but it does not displace the internal incentives and controls that supervisors increasingly expect.

Standortfördergesetz (StoFöG): Context and Practical Interfaces

Managers should treat StoFöG as a contextual policy framework whose asset-management relevance will arise through interfaces rather than substitutions. In practice, the most plausible interfaces are threefold.

First, tool-box and product access. Where StoFöG supports the conditions for capital formation and market functioning, it may indirectly reinforce Germany’s modernization of fund forms— closed-ended Sondervermögen and the opening of the open-ended Investment-AG form for real estate and infrastructure— by fostering demand, infrastructure, or administrative clarity; however, the legal ability to launch and operate these products continues to derive from KAGB amendments and related supervisory practice.

Second, digital and data infrastructure. If StoFöG channels support to digital market infrastructure, managers can leverage it to operationalize tokenization and DLT use cases, improve reporting data flows, and strengthen cyber resilience. Yet the duties to preserve investor protections, model governance, reconstructability of reports, and enforceability of outsourcing and incident-response arrangements remain fixed under EU and German sectoral rules.

Third, execution efficiencies. Location-friendly measures can accelerate time-to-market by improving ecosystem readiness— specialized service providers, testing environments, or administrative pathways—benefits that translate only if product disclosures, suitability frameworks, and authorization dossiers reflect the heightened specificity demanded by AIFMD II/FRiG and German supervisory expectations.

Managers should therefore integrate StoFöG considerations into strategic planning, procurement, and ecosystem selection while continuing to calibrate legal risk and operating design primarily to AIFMD II, FRiG/ KAGB amendments, and BaFin/ ESMA practice.

KAGB vs. insolvency law

The German KAGB has always occupied a special position with respect to insolvency law due to the structure of a contractually constituted investment funds (Sondervermögen) without having an own legal personality, especially since a Sondervermögen itself is not subject to insolvency proceedings. Under the FRiG, managers get granted a right to refuse performance if and for as long as the manager’s claim for reimbursement of expenses against the Sondervermögen it manages cannot be satisfied. As a result, contractual counterparties are asked to wait for an improvement in the fund’s liquidity without being able to trigger the remedies available under insolvency law. It remains to be seen when the market will expose the attendant risks for such counterparties.

Fund market business ideas in persistently low-transaction real estate markets

While traditional real estate funds still have to contend with a lack of transactions, uncertain price developments, rising costs in financing and project development, waning lending appetite, and declining confidence, crisis-driven new business models are emerging that could give the fund industry fresh momentum. Alongside indispensable restructuring efforts, repackaging structures are being developed that allow mainly institutional investors, in particular those under pressure from regulatory capital requirements, to spin off own portfolios into specialized funds in a taxoptimized and balancesheetcleansing manner. Similar models are aimed at banks with respect to nonperforming real estate loan portfolios.

What to Expect Next

Three trajectories remain decisive. The fusion of risk, sustainability, and performance into integrated portfolio construction will deepen across asset classes; data discipline—traceable, auditable, and repeatable—will separate leaders from laggards; and legal clarity around digital infrastructure will gradually reduce friction in issuance, settlement, and transfer without sacrificing investor protections. In this environment, StoFöG’s role is best understood as a policy backdrop that may enhance Germany’s operating conditions for asset managers while the binding drivers of compliance, authorization, and investor protection remain those detailed in this article’s FRiG/AIFMD II-centric analysis. Firms that align products with plain-spoken disclosures, operate explainable reporting, govern outsourcing with enforceable safeguards, and deploy secure, understandable technology will continue to convert regulatory competence into competitive advantage.